Category: Blog Posts

So there I was, sipping my third cup of coffee at 1 PM. I can already feel my attention slipping away towards some other damn thing.

The other day I said I’d (try to) write every day—yet here I am a few days later. Easy there, tiger, you can only achieve so much.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, I’d rather not—I’d rather rot. And this is what ejects out of my fingers with no target in mind. It’s like standing with a drawn bow, blindfolded, and not actually having a target to hit. I whisper to whatever god may stand high above me in the clouds and hope something meaningful comes out.

But does it have to mean anything? Does there have to be a point to these small posts? No, it doesn’t have to. But a meaning does make a reading better. After all, I’m just typing the very first thing that comes to mind. Shit, if I was reading this I would’ve stopped reading by the second or third sentence.

This month is National Novel Writing Month. I had a dose of medication and wrote somewhere around 2500 words in an hour and felt pretty good about that. I haven’t touched it since. I wrote around 9000 words this summer for some shit story akin to The Rum Diary. One of my favorite quotes from The Rum Diary is “I’ve got no voice, I don’t know how to write like myself.”

A lot of young writers face this dilemma (me included). A lot of young writers also idolize Thompson (me included). I’ve spent so long trying to write like my favroite writers instead of just writing like myself—but I don’t know how. It’s all so common. I find blogs from other writers and their posts often reflect mine—spread out posts that mention they don’t know how to write, just haven’t found that one bit of push that would bring them into the groove.

“A man is the sum of his experiences,” Thompson once said. It’s hard to be yourself with little experience on hand. Even now, a word document is minimized on my dock for a short essay on why I would be a good fit for a NASA internship. That’s life experience, right?

I guess we’re all just waiting for the right story to come along. Maybe we should start searching instead.

Ooph, what a drag right? Hard to write every day when there’s nothing to write about. I sat down at my desk looking out at the rain as it fell down from up above. Did you know that rainwater is actually incredibly dirty? It takes a speck of dirt or what have you to form the droplets in the sky. Speaking of dirt, this floor is disgusting. I’ll just go grab the broom and…

There it goes again. It’s so easy to slip away from the keyboard when a blank page stares back (that damn menace). Writing has always been fun for me, but only when I feel myself fall into the groove of things. But some days it’s really hard to find that groove. Those days are the ones I give up and don’t write a thing.

I played a joke on myself with the title of this blog. Clearly, I never post daily (I tend to forget about it most days). I’ve always wanted to take it to the next level but I just never had. “Tomorrow,” I’d say. Then I’d say the same thing the next day. “Oh, I don’t have anything planned Friday—I’ll do it that day.” But Friday is the day to relax! Oh god, it just keeps going.

What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t easy to write every day. But it’s not meant to be easy. This isn’t some new revelation at all—we’ve all known this since the beginning of everything. Writing is hard, writing is work, writing sucks at the soul—why did I choose to do this I wonder?

Because I’m the most myself when my fingers fall over the keyboard. Because the feeling I get looking at the blocks of words I wrote (bad or good) elevates me higher than anything else I know. Because when I was a little kid all I wanted to do was write stories and share them with my friends. Because I am who I am.

I’ll try to post more—maybe daily if I can muster some semblance of something. I don’t even care if anyone is paying attention. It was always just for me anyways (sorry kids). Stay safe out there,